


On the Dignity of Man

by deprofundisclamavi



Category: Vampire Chronicles - All Media Types, Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-10
Updated: 2014-10-10
Packaged: 2018-02-20 15:41:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2434112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deprofundisclamavi/pseuds/deprofundisclamavi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marius meets a young mortal boy and must consider why he so very captivated.  Backstory to their meeting will be given in subsequent chapters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Dignity of Man

She came into the room on light feet, carried through space in the effortless manner of a ghost. It was the low squeak of the door that alerted me to Pandora’s presence, and when I looked up at her, it was not with surprise or curiosity, just acknowledgement. I was used to this fractured routine of ours, which we played through together over and over again as timeless decades passed. We would spend nights together, sometimes one or sometimes more, and then she would inevitably leave without announcing her departure. I would never know when she would appear or vanish back to her home far away.

Pandora was the type to come and go, a relentless wanderer. Once grounded, as strong and steady as a rooted tree, now she had the habits of a shadow. 

Silent, melancholy, and content to move through the world without ever touching it. I would call it searching if only I knew what it was that she was looking for. No, she was not restless or seeking, she only wanted to become the wind in a world that kept changing. 

Immortals are constant and unchanging. We may cover ourselves in current fashions and fill our homes with the latest electronics, yet our spirits remain what they have always been. The world swells around us and our souls seem small, growing smaller through the passing of countless ages of which we all too easily lose track. What else can we do but admit in our very souls that we are but specks of dust in dim crevices of vast space, and made no more grand or important by our nature. Understanding this is necessary for survival, for keeping madness away.

Some of us stay still, steady and predictable, though by no means absent from human progress. Others take up the challenge to remain immersed in the world as active and engaged entities. The pursuit is a simple one: begin at one end of the earth and make your way patiently through teeming cities and sleepy towns full of quaint traditions. Come to know humans, come to love them, learn new things, and then move on. Chart a course from one city all the way around the globe. By the time you return to where you started, a new generation is upon civilization and everything has changed. All that was once known are but shadows to new things. All things must change, yet the immortal is constant, a non-variable, and the untouched toucher.

I am, as ever, the steady and remote. Pandora is the mover, the phantom.

There was an hour left before dawn. Already I could feel the sluggish heaviness of my limbs that would soon conquer consciousness, no matter how unwilling the mind and body, leaving me no choice but to seek comforting darkness. This room, my study, had been designed with no windows, but I did not need a window to feel the sun rising.

Pandora sat herself boldly on my reading couch. Almost an afterthought, she plucked up the pillow that I often rested my head on and brought it into her lap. I watched her with patience, waiting for whatever it was that she wanted to say. When only silence and a long gaze came from her, I picked back up my dropped pen and gave an audible sigh. I sought for something to say even as I went back to writing in my leather-bound journal, though no words could come from my mind presently disturbed by her reticence.

I suspected she wanted to know about the mortal boy who resided now in the story above. The steady weight of her eyes and closed off expression chastised me and she had not even yet said a single word. That I should be scolded without introduction or comment made me bristle with annoyance, a visible shift in my demeanor that she saw but still chose not to comment, of course.

Was she trying to provoke me? The thought made me frown and drop my pen, abandoning the pretense of writing. I longed for the reprieved of writing, of watching dark black letters appear in organized rows, each one of singular and collective beauty, made of soft curves and sharp ends the same as musical notes.

In truth, I wanted Pandora here. Her presence was soothing, at least most of the time, and right now I needed her. It would be premature to begin our time together with a fight that would surely drive her away. 

“And such too is the grandeur of the dooms we have imagined for the mighty dead; an endless fountain of immortal drink, pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink,” I finally said because I knew of her weakness for poetry and for old Gods and myths. When she smiled in reply, I was glad for it. No matter how long I lived or the years of bitterness that went between the two of us, I loved the way she smiled at me. It was not the same smile that she gave to strangers or even to friends. It belonged only to me. 

“Is that what we are? Sleeping lovers kissed by the moon?” she asked me, turning to curl her legs under her body and stare directly toward me. 

“It is one alternative,” I said with an easy shrug and a smile meant to charm her. “Certainly one of the better ones that I have heard.”

“My Marius,” Pandora spoke softly after a drawn out pause, “Who is the mortal boy sleeping upstairs?”

Naturally, she had sensed the presence of my young mortal consort. Before she even so much as walked through the front door, she would have felt his heartbeat and known of him. Then again, I was hardly concealing him from her. When I brought him here, I had known that I would have to explain him to Pandora should she visit. In any event, I would have to introduce them eventually. My plans would bind us all together, albeit with loose- though not unbreakable- bonds.

“Michael. A lover of Lestat,” I closed my heavy journal and sat back in my high backed chair, caressing wooden arms carved into the shape of twin lions roaring with silent ferocity.

“Why is he here in this home and not with Lestat?” Pandora was too clever to divert, and so she always knew the right and most persistent questions to ask.

“Because of a chain of events set into motion that cannot be stopped, but only come to one end,” I was not trying to talk around the issue, but I found the complexity of it wearisome to explain. “You cannot bring someone halfway into darkness and then expect them to find their way back to light once abandoned. If they even do find their back into a world of light, they will forever remember the darkness. The darkness would stamp the soul, and thereafter be sought relentlessly until mortal life loses its every luster. Either you choose to leave them to their madness that surely comes, or you bring them all the way into our world. To abandon is cruel and irresponsible. It is selfish and fickle.”

“That is a matter for this boy and Lestat. Let Lestat make him if Lestat wants him made. Humans suffer all over the world, both the innocent and the evil. Why should the suffering of one mortal boy matter to you?” Pandora pushed the pillow from her lap as I rose from the back of my desk. There was a part of me that wanted to go to her, but I did not like how this conversation was unfolding so far. Instead, I sat myself on the edge of the front of my desk, crossing my arms over my chest as if to guard against her words, but it was really more to guard against my desire for her and also to let her know that I was displeased with this conversation.

“Lestat approached Daniel to make Michael. I will not have Daniel make a fledgling under duress. He should make his companions from necessity: love and need of them. Not to hand one over to someone else, or for the pleasure of another. No, let Daniel preserve the strength of his blood for one he truly loves and wishes to have at his side,” I shook my head to emphasize my point.

“You who waited centuries to make a second child… why are you so eager now to make fledglings for those who do not ask it of you?” Pandora, undeterred by my rigid posture, rose from the couch to approach me.

Her patient and exact steps brought her toward me slowly and I took my first full look at Pandora. She had pulled her hair up and away from her Hellenistic face, displaying the gentle contours of old Senatorial cheekbones and jaw. The unhindered eye could trace the elegant curvature of her sculpted neck from the base of her ear to her shoulder. The vulnerability of her skin made me think about rough kisses and blood. Her arms were wonderfully bare, extending elegantly from a body so perfectly statuesque that I thought of Galatea only recently made flesh from perfect stone. How badly I wanted to play Pygmalion and kiss the last chill away.

These thoughts came with a sudden spike of desire that made me wonder if her hairstyle and choice of clothing had been both cleverly selected with a purpose to distract or seduce me. Pandora knew how much I loved her arms, and loved her blood even more. 

She put her hands on the sides of my head, tenderly touching me with a grip that could have been deadly. I had seen these delicate hands crush living creatures to death, yet for me they were gentle and living. Immediately, I felt my shoulders slacken and my neck relax until my head fell forward against her chest, cushioned against her hard yet supple body. I listened to the primal beat of her heart until my body fell in sync with hers and my heart beat the same rhythm.

This moment was too sacred to disrupt with words or movement no matter how badly I wanted to grab her by the arms and kiss her neck until blood flowed freely from her into me. We were frozen together in semblance of a bizarre holy rite, her hands giving soft absolution to a mind poisoned by confusion. What were we but monsters mimicking the gentle motions of humanity? Dwelling underneath our beautiful disguises, we were in truth strange pagan grotesqueries. Together we were made of the same antiquated material found preserved in museums, but lacking the beauty and innocence that infused marble carved by the hands of men in the spirit of God and angels. Our immortality was an aberration, a crime against the very nature we sought peace within.

“Why must you do this? Do not say for Lestat or Daniel. You may be able to fool them, even yourself, but you cannot fool me.” I felt her breath against my ear, a soft tickling brush that should have been a comforting thing had her words not filled me with an instant annoyance that teetered dangerously on the brink of anger.

I pulled myself away from the comfort of her hands and stood to my full height, slipping away from where Pandora pressed me between her body and the desk.  
“You know nothing of it,” I informed her, my voice sharper than I intended it to be. 

“Perhaps, but I know you, Marius,” Pandora sat on the edge of my desk in the place I had abandoned, her hands grasping the wood next to her thighs. “If Lestat wants his lover made, let him do it himself. Does he want the mental link to remain? Does he fear the repercussions of making a lover into an immortal child? In that case, let him come and ask you, or ask someone else. Marius, your blood is too powerful to give away carelessly. This is hasty.”

“You don’t understand,” it was all I could say, offended that she should consider my actions rash as if I had not spent nights agonizing over my final decision. To express my wholehearted rejection of her assumption, I gave a fervent shake of my head meant to punctuate the true depth of my simple statement.

“Then make me understand,” Pandora’s voice was as calm as ever, unaffected by my passion.

“Humans hunger, but they hunger for superficial pleasures. There was once a time when man sought to attain the highest level of achievement that his potential could allow, and then even to surpass that boundary. I speak of Humanism, of course. There was a want for knowledge and true understanding, of reason and faith coexisting away from superstition and madness that had afflicted the middle ages. Do you remember what it was like? The passion within the human sense of grand place in the world, and indeed the vey duty of man to look around the world and question what it was he saw laid out before him. Pico della Mirandola said that God made man because he needed a being with intelligence to appreciate the world God made. Mirandola said, ‘it is not freedom from a body, but its spiritual intelligence, which makes the angel. If you see a man bedazzled by the empty forms of the imagination, as by the wiles of Calypso, and through their alluring solicitations made a slave to his own senses, you see a brute and not a man. If, however, you see a philosopher, judging and distinguishing all things according to the rule of reason, him shall you hold in veneration, for he is a creature of heaven and not of earth; if, finally, a pure contemplator, unmindful of the body, wholly withdrawn into the inner chambers of the mind, here indeed is neither a creature of earth nor a heavenly creature, but some higher divinity, clothed in human flesh.’”

I paused and looked at Pandora, and she returned my stare with an affectionate smile though I had no smile to give in return. 

“Is that not the most worthy of any life purpose? Even more worthy when given infinite length and power? To ascend to the divinity of the true philosopher and thinker, indeed a historian of time? Since the Renaissance, a gleaming period of human progress, potential, and ascension, humans have given themselves over to renewed hatred and superstition. What do we have to show for the next centuries but bloody religious wars, and then wars of politics and xenophobia? At the end of it all, what do we truly have? Generations of people who would rather use the internet to teach themselves insignificant snippets of temporary information than learn about the world around them. Past, present, and future is lost. To find a soul that craves knowledge, truth, and history is like finding a gem within endless miles of mud and filth. Most people do not care about the significance of the mind and soul, and no one questions the reality that they see every day. It simply exists. Pandora, I found on who does. Should we not preserve this? Should we not take this beautiful soul and give it the strength and years to become that higher form of human divinity, a thing still cloaked in human flesh and of beauty beyond description?”

Pandora came to me, ending the ceaseless pacing of my agitated oration. Her lovely slim arms, delicate despite their strength, slipped around my shoulders and neck. One hand went into the back of my hair to give a gentle massage that sent ripples of pleasure down my entire back and made me instantly drowsy.  
“You see yourself in him,” she murmured as she stood on the tips of her toes to place a kiss against my jaw.

“He wants from eternity the same as me,” I muttered, wrapping my arms around her waist. All my restlessness began to melt away, and with it the muddled state of my brain. “To preserve all knowledge, to house it in a clever immortal brain capable of making more of it than what can be imparted in a human lifespan on pen and paper that lacks life or the capacity to analyze and judge.”

Pandora responded with another kiss, this time to my chin.

“How I can let a boy of this much promise succumb to madness or mortal death? I have let it happen before and come to regret not protecting genius and talent. I feel he is on the cusp of losing himself. One foot in darkness and the other grasping desperately for light. I must pull him from the brink before it is too late and all of his potential is lost. What else waits but a premature death? Better that his death come with the promise of eternity and not to snuff out the life that is in him.”

“Lestat may not thank you for this,” Pandora was only saying what I knew in my heart, her kisses moving to my ear. I barely heard her words to contemplate them, entirely too distracted by the feeling of her heart beating from her breast into my chest as if it connected the two of us, which spiked a sudden hunger inside of me.

How many nights had ended just like this? I would drink from her or she from me. I loved the weakness of my limbs and the harsh pull of her mouth, thirsty drinks tugging painfully at my heart until I was left without strength enough to hold myself up. Even when I collapsed, her body would follow mine in one fluid motion, her drinking without pause. Only at that point, driven by the insatiable desires of both hunger and lust, would I drive my teeth into her and take back all of the blood that she had taken from me. In those intimate moments, our hearts and minds would be completely open to one another.

“Then he must see that it is the right thing to do, and only necessary because of his selfishness.” It was harder to form words with her lips pressing insistent kisses against mine. 

“You are making a mistake,” Pandora claimed my hands and pulled me toward the door. “Let sleep give you the wisdom to see this.”

“What if it does not?” We moved toward the hallway that led into the depths of the house. Within the basement was a large and heavy door, impossible for any human man to open, protected by locks and an electronic alarm system. Beyond the door was a hidden room too comfortable and well-adorned to call a crypt, yet that was what it was essentially. There was a large bed and desk for writing, cabinets of clothing and lanterns. Expensive tapestries and carpets layered the walls and floor. More importantly, this room was impenetrable to both mortal and sun. 

“Then you will do this thing and we will see,” her logic was simple and to the point. I responded with silence, unlocking the door to where we could sleep in the day hours. Pandora did not press me further, but her judgment rest heavily upon my mind, trying to plan seeds of hateful doubt that I would not suffer because I knew I was right. Though Pandora had thought to persuade me to chance course, all her misgiving had accomplished was to embed even deeper my purpose. In giving voice to my rationale to defend it, I had untangled its coiled threads and was left even more confident. For the first time in many nights, my mind was clear and at peace.

The time for talk was over and I wanted the few minutes left before dawn to be for Pandora and I alone. Of course, Pandora had a mind for the same, and I let her pull me to the bed, always more comfortable, certainly much more fun, when she shared it with me. Her kisses shook off the darkness of dawn, her caresses made me forget entirely the boy who rest upstairs. Her body shared breath with mine, whispering the unspoken, until we were both full of each other's blood and memories, every sense now in sync with one another. When her head rest upon my shoulder, the heaviness of dawn turned us to stone.


End file.
